If you were told today that you'd been selected for a TEDx talk and the event was in October, what would you be worried about,? What concerns would you have? I want to help people in their community to handle high stakes presentations, but to do a good job for you I need to understand what concerns you the most...

Welcome to new members: @Cec Hansson @Bo McCoy of The 7-Day Identity Reset Skool community (formerly Begin Purpose) @Andréanne Brault This week I mentioned the progress I am making with @Dani Rosenblad James on our upcoming workshop. And I mentioned I will be promoting my own Captivation Architecture Framework program in the next month or two, through Skool.

Every other speaker that year at TEDxRuakura had arrived with something they ached to say. A cause. A question that kept them up at night. You could feel it the moment they started. Not him. He'd chosen his topic strategically — picked what he thought would be popular. And our whole coaching team felt it. We worked hard to help him find a personal thread, some genuine connection to the material. He found one, eventually. But the talk stayed flat. Competent and hollow at the same time. In hindsight, I might have pulled it. I kept coming back to a line from Muhammad Ali: "In my mind the losers are those who don't have a cause they care about." I read it the way most people would — about the speaker. Speak about what you love, or don't bother. But there's a second half I almost missed. The audience came looking for a cause too. People sit down in front of a speaker hoping to be given something to believe in — hope, purpose, a reason to think tomorrow could be better. That's not a nice-to-have. It's most of why they're there. When you speak about something you genuinely care about, you're not indulging yourself. You're meeting the deepest reason your audience showed up. This is why "what topic will perform well?" is the wrong first question. An audience can feel the difference between a talk you chose and a talk you needed to give. One informs them. The other gives them something to hold onto. When did you last hear someone speak about something they truly cared about — and what did it do to the room? 😉

That was the comment in the camera monitor room. Our speaker was on stage, mid-sentence, delivering the talk she'd spent weeks building. The message was sharp. She knew every word. She was calm and completely present — exactly where we'd worked to get her. And on screen, the audience could see her face and her hands. Nothing else. She'd worn black. The curtain behind her was black. Under the lights, the camera erased everything in between. A floating head, gesturing into the dark. Live in the room, she was magnificent. On the recording — the thing that would outlive the event and reach ten times the audience — she was a pair of hands and a face. Fortunately we caught it at dress rehearsal the day before. New top, deep blue, problem solved. But it's stayed with me. Because she'd done the hard part. The clarity. The structure. The hours of making the talk hers. All of it nearly undone by a wardrobe choice nobody had told her mattered. You can get the message perfect and still disappear if you ignore the container it lives in. Most experts pour everything into what they'll say. Almost no one thinks about how they'll be seen — the background, the lights, the camera quietly making decisions on your behalf. The content was never the weak point. The container was. When has a small, overlooked detail nearly swallowed something you'd worked hard on? 😉

I recorded this yesterday, and I thought I had posted it... but obviously I hadn't. Firstly welcome to new members: @Charissa Cheong @Russ Ward I talk about the upcoming Millionaire Speaker Summit, that I will be speaking at in a few weeks, free to attend and I would appreciate you registering even if you can't make it. 😉 And there is also the free AI tool that I mentioned in a previous post. I also get a little philosophical over a tweet I came across this week.